


The Purpose of Life

by fawatson



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:50:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1566899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/pseuds/fawatson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lilly Jr and Maree join the Dendarii and have a small adventure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Purpose of Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Minutia_R](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/gifts).



> _Request:_  
>  Okay, but what if instead of being what it was, Mirror Dance had been the Young Adult adventures of Lilly Junior and Maree, with Mark and Miles and the Dendarii playing the roles of the occasionally helpful but ultimately unreliable adults, and it’s the preteen girls who have to save the day? Obviously I don’t expect you to write me a book, but a scene from that book, or something in the spirit of that book, would be great. I really just want Lilly and Maree being BFFs, whether they’re growing up together in the gilded cage of Bharaputra’s clone-creche, or encountering each other again in the years after Mirror Dance. (Lilly/Maree would be peachy keen too.) 
> 
> _Disclaimer:_  
>  I do not own these characters and make no profit by them.

Lilly groaned slightly as she woke. It was just _too_ hot and she couldn’t _move_. Bleary eyes opened and, lifting her head slightly, she peered down along her body. One very large calico cat snuggled against her side; against the queen’s side snuggled four nursing kittens. A little beyond, anchoring her feet and proudly surveying his offspring, sprawled a magnificent long-haired dark brown striped tom. The kittens squealed as she rolled – carefully – in the opposite direction. She had disturbed their suckling. Tom leapt off the bunk with her, following her into the shower room, where he rubbed against her legs as she cleaned her teeth and brushed her hair. It took a few seconds to find a clean uniform amidst the mess; she made a mental note to remind Maree to tidy her side of the cabin next time they ran into one another. 

“Yes, all right, I know: you need feeding; as if I’d forget!” 

She refilled the water bowl and opened two pouches of food for the cats. Her nose wrinkled in distaste as she checked the waste disposal tray for the cats, and pressed a small lever to send it to recycling. It wasn’t her favourite task; but at least it wasn’t like centuries ago when they’d had peculiar arrangements using clay pebbles in a plastic box that had to be emptied by hand. If that had been the case, Lilly thought, she’d probably have put her foot down and flat out refused to let Maree get a kitten. She grimaced. Not that she was terribly good at setting boundaries where Maree was concerned. One cat, she’d said, just _one_!

Tom slipped out of the cabin after her. She watched him, fluffy tail swaying proudly as he strutted toward the galley, where, no doubt, he would be stroked, pampered, and in all probability, fed another breakfast. She headed in the opposite direction. 

The doctor nodded acknowledgement as Lilly entered sick bay. She was busy with Admiral Quinn’s daily visit to review the wounded and otherwise-out-of-action, so Lilly went straight to the duty desk to read the night log, bringing herself up to speed. They were between actions; and their last commission – which had successfully concluded seven days ago with the rescue of a small group of Komarran elite businessmen from some pirates operating out of an asteroid belt near Vervain – had resulted in minimal casualties, so sick bay was remarkably free of patients at the moment. 

With the exception of Trooper Norton, that is. He had come down five days ago with a mysterious disfiguring illness which could not be identified. He was running a temperature, coughing a lot, complained of headache, and three-quarters of his body was covered with an unsightly red rash that he said itched like blazes. To top it off his eyes continually watered and he had a bad case of diarrhea. Until they identified the malady he was in isolation. 

The Dendarii fleet surgeon joined Lilly after a few minutes, handed over to her the latest information about the so far fruitless tests to isolate the pathogen inflicting Norton, and left. Lilly drew some blood from the moaning scratching man and began a new series of experiments. Almost she could imagine herself back on Escobar in her grandmother Lilly’s lab, working under her direction, though her lab assistant at home would have been Laburnum or Lilac, not the blond technician who worked on the bench to her left. After some wait, the equipment pinged completion of the latest analysis – another failure. 

Frustrating though that was, as she set up for yet another test, Lilly felt a sense of satisfaction. This was her lab, not the Durona group’s. Unlike the other clones who had been sent to an exclusive boarding school, courtesy of the Barrayaran Imperium, she had been claimed by her family the moment they arrived at Escobar. Reassuring as it had been to join the Duronas when she was first freed from House Bharaputra – to know she still had a place and a purpose beyond Lotus (not to mention the first class education they had crammed into her brain) – it had not taken many months before the closeness turned to claustrophobia. It wasn’t just they all looked like her; they all _thought_ like her (or believed they did, which really meant they all operated under the assumption they knew what was best). But she had not been raised in the bosom of her sib-group; she was the product of a Bharaputra clone-crèche; it was tellingly different. She’d stuck it out the years needed to get her qualifications, but then jumped ship – literally – joining the Dendarii the next time they dropped off corpsicles for resuscitation. The machine pinged again – another negative experiment. Lilly focused on preparing the next test tube.

*****

Maree was stripping down to the buff almost as soon as the cabin door slid shut, desperate to get into the shower and clean away the day’s grime. The Chief Engineer was taking advantage of the lull in operations to overhaul the flagship’s waste disposal system. _Last_ time he’d been this obsessed, he’d overhauled the pulsar cannon (unimpressed as he’d been with their performance in some action off Aslund). That had been clean work; this.... She’d been lugging parts around all afternoon; crawling in small access tubes to hand him various tools while he adjusted the machinery; and slithering in things she’d really rather not think about (let alone smell). When they’d discussed the cat she’d acquired on Earth, Maree had blithely assured Lilly the little queen would create ‘no problems.’ Given the mess she’d been dealing with today she might have to rethink that.

Her breasts _hurt_ from the number of times she’d squeezed them into too tight spaces or bumped them against bulkheads as she’d misjudged distances. And this was after having had the reduction surgery. Not for the first time she wondered about the progenitor who’d ordered those body mods. What did it say about the woman’s self-image that she’d _wanted_ to carry that weight around? It had been some time since Maree yearned to meet her ‘mother’ but there was still a part of her that wondered. Those oversized breasts had served no useful purpose. Surgery had left her mammaries a generous size, but in better proportion to her overall frame. She hadn’t found it changed the focus of male interest when she met someone new; men still looked first at her chest before paying attention to anything else. Her breasts no longer impeded; but they did allow her to enjoy the somewhat stunned expressions on the faces of male opponents when, in skin-tight bodysuit, she faced off in hand-to-hand combat. They never hit their hardest against her, which gave her a distinct advantage. 

A protesting squeak from her feet stopped her just in time from putting her full weight on her left foot. She reached down and picked up the squirming striped kitten whose tail she had just stepped on. 

“Sorry, love,” she murmured to him softly, as she cuddled him against her chest. “Ouch!” she exclaimed, as he escaped her grasp and clawed his way up to her shoulder. He essayed a small lick, sneezed, shook his tiny head and jumped off, shaking each paw with distaste despite his wobbly landing. “I don’t blame you.”

She took extra time in the sonic shower before donning a loose wraparound dress which signalled she was off-shift, and went in search of food.

*****

This part of being independent Quinn didn’t much like. Impossible missions in answer to secret orders from Imperial masters might sometimes leave her fuming (particularly those few times when Allegre sent out suggestions for how to accomplish a task, or – less commonly – saddled her with an observer; though thankfully those occasions were increasingly rare as she had proved her worth ten times over by now). But at least they led to _action_. However, to her never-ending surprise, Miles’ clone-brother’s suggestion to Gregor that the Dendarii might run at a profit, returning marks to the Imperial coffer rather than simply draining ImpSec’s budget, had been taken up. During downtimes she was tasked with being a real mercenary, selling her little fleet as swords-for-hire (or more properly, plasma beams on contract) on the open market. Leading to this – the bit Quinn didn’t like about being Admiral: glad-handing the customer and showing her round.

Amelia Carrington was white-haired and frail but that did not stop her from displaying overwhelming arrogance. She had been late boarding and no sooner arrived than she had demanded a tour; nothing would do but the Admiral to show her round personally. The go-between who had brokered this deal had impressed on Quinn that this thin, bad-tempered, and quite remarkably wrinkled old woman wielded power in Pol far beyond anyone else by dint of owning half that system and having, not just fingers but probably both feet as well, in the pies of all the businesses she didn’t own outright. But all the power in the system could not prevent accidents, which had put her personal cruiser out of order. It seemed the elderly woman feared assassination plots if she chartered through normal commercial sources, hence her decision to ship with mercenaries. Within five minutes of meeting her Quinn regretted taking the commission, no matter how lucrative. They might only have the woman on board for 24 hours but she could already tell it was going to be a long passage.

*****

The mess hall had been turned into an impromptu theatre for the evening. Truth was, the life of a mercenary crew normally involved weeks, if not months, of boredom punctuated by days of high adrenaline excitement during assignments. This left ample time for hobbies, and, living in close proximity as they did, the crew also all knew one another’s interests and pitched in to help where possible. The second engineer was something of an old film buff. Not of modern holovids; but of the old-fashioned ‘movies’ from 20th Century Earth. Made pre space-flight, they did not operate on modern systems; the challenge for the engineering department had been to recreate the old-style technology needed to view the films. Amidst mishaps (including loading it backwards) the film had just started operating when Amelia Carrington's orientation tour arrived.

“What’s the show tonight?” asked Admiral Quinn. 

“Something called, ‘Love is a Many-Splendored Thing’” answered Maree. “The blurb on the cover called it a ‘weepie’, whatever _that_ is.” She giggled. The film was so bad that already some of the crew were up at the front of the hall, posturing and declaiming, in between bouts of laughter and rude suggestions shouted helpfully from the audience. And it was only the first reel of eight. “Mr Jesek sent it from Escobar.” 

The laughter and general merriment of the crowd in the hall must have been infectious, because, to the Admiral’s surprise her passenger decided to abandon the rest of the tour and stay to watch. Relieved, Quinn left her in the capable hands of Maree.

*****

Alone in sick bay, Lilly began the task of creating temporary patient records for the passengers. They might only be on board for 24 hours; but all people embarking on the _Peregrine_ had to have a medical file in case of emergency. The dirt-side doctors had sent them through securely from one computer to another; the files contained a time-coded virus that would make them self-destruct after 48 hours. Had she been busy she would not have had time to save them to new folders within the sick bay system. But the only patient was Trooper Norton; and exasperated by his incessant scratching and whimpering, Lilly had given him a sedative. Struck by an idea for a fresh avenue of enquiry, she had begun a new series of tests trying to isolate whatever bacteria infected him. More complicated than all the ones tried previously put together, they would take a few hours to run. She had nothing better to do; and entered the codes to access the new passengers' medical histories. The maid was young and healthy; no hidden conditions to be concerned about. Her wealthy employer never travelled without at least two bodyguards; but, redundant on a mercenary ship (and potentially a source of trouble), they had orders to stay the full voyage in their cabin. They would be unlikely to need medical attention but thorough as always, Lilly checked their files too. They had the usual history of injuries one would expect for anyone in that trade. Amelia Carrington appeared reasonably healthy given her age; but.... Lilly checked the gene-scan again. It was....

She sat back in her chair, shivering slightly as memory sent her back through the years to the clone crèche. Lilly had known the truth about her fate, about the intended fates of them _all_ ; but though rumours had circulated, no one had really wanted to believe and none had been more hopeful – more gullible really – than Maree who had recounted over and over the story of how her mother was coming to get her. 

Lilly looked again at the gene-scan. Yes, it certainly appeared Maree’s mother had indeed come to get her.

*****

“How long have you been a mercenary dear?” asked Amelia Carrington.

“A couple of years,” replied Maree politely. She was seated by the film projector, which periodically needed a bit of coaxing to keep running. Her mind turned over the question of lubricant for the balky machine; obviously back in the old days they must have used something different from the silicate gel the Chief Engineer had provided. The tom cat kneaded her lap and purred loudly as she stroked him, protesting periodically when she shifted him slightly to make adjustments to the machine. 

“And an engineer, I see, like me.” 

Startled, Maree looked at the passenger. 

“In my youth, that is,” smiled Amelia Carrington. “It’s how I met my husband; he hired me for his business.” And then I took him, and it, over, she thought to herself. But she had more sense than to say it. She kept her voice honeyed and expression pleasant as she chatted to the young woman she had come so far to find. She seemed fond of the cat, so Amelia Carrington stretched out a tentative hand to pet him, only to snatch it back quickly as he hissed and swiped a paw at her. The nasty beast had drawn blood!

*****

Lilly had brought tools with her to pick the lock if needed; but in fact, there was no need. The handle turned and she slipped silently into the guest cabin, taking care to lock it behind her. It wouldn’t do to be disturbed. Madam Carrington’s overnight bag had already been unpacked by the maid; expensive toiletries adorned the bedside table. Lilly opened a small carved wooden box containing six tightly fastened glass bottles. She held one up to the light; this was no cosmetic. Test strips dipped one by one into each container were inserted into her handheld scanner: three poisons (one fast acting and two slow), a strong sedative, and fast-penta. She could not identify the final substance. No doubt it was noxious like the rest; but it was the fact she didn’t know what it was, that made her shudder. Before, there had been a slight chance this visit was coincidence; but the contents of the cabin confirmed: this was no innocent old woman. Crammed between the bunk and clothes locker was a large trunk, outsize given the brevity of this journey. Normally it would be stored in the hold; it could only have been brought to the cabin on explicit order of its owner. A brief look inside confirmed it was empty of all save padded restraints and breathing equipment. There was enough space - barely - left for a small body when carefully folded. It was just the size to be comfortably carried by two bodyguards, loyal (and no doubt well-remunerated) retainers who would not comment on the difference in weight of the box between start and end of this trip.

Lilly heard the slight scraping that signalled a wand-key being inserted into cabin’s door lock, and had just enough time to dart into the shower cubicle, leaving the door slightly ajar so she could eavesdrop. It came as no surprise to see Maree acting escort to the old woman. Lilly watched as Amelia Carrington charmed and smiled, asking Maree to fix her a drink of cordial and pointing to the decanter on the bedside filled with clear green liquid. Lilly could have kicked herself for not testing it. Amenable as always, Maree didn’t decline the offer to join. Lilly watched with horror the crocodile smile on Madam Carrington’s face as she directed the drinks’ preparation. This had gone on long enough. Lilly pushed open the shower-room door, stunner to the ready. Both women looked up from the glasses they were clinking, startled. Brilliant blue eyes, identical in colour and shape, stared in surprise at Lilly, one pair warm and friendly, the other venomous. 

“Don’t drink that, Maree,” said Lilly. “I don’t know what it is; but judging by the rest of her belongings, it’s nothing you want to try.” She paused a moment, knowing the impact of what she was about to reveal, before adding quietly, “My guess is it’s some sort of sedative, as she’s your ‘mother’ come to steal back her clone.”

Maree’s eyes widened. Gullible and hopeful she might have been years before, so eagerly determined to meet her mother she would run into danger unwittingly; but she was not that same girl now. And her reflexes, honed by paramilitary training, were as sharp as they could be. Swiftly she twisted the old woman’s arm up, pressing the glass to her lips.

“You drink it,” Maree demanded. 

*****

As Admiral Quinn put the finishing touches to her despatch to General Allegre, she remembered the desperate raid to save the clones years before. The anguish over Miles’ death and loss of his cryo-chamber had not completely overshadowed her sense of regret that they had not saved all the clones, nor the satisfaction about the ones they had rescued. The thought that someone had tried to infiltrate and steal a member of _her_ crew, a young woman she had personally been involved in saving all those years ago.... Quinn’s eyes narrowed in anger. Fortunately Lilly had acted decisively; the horrible old woman had slept through the trip to the Hegen Hub, slept all the way to delivery to civil security officers, along with signed affidavits. This little adventure hadn’t been an assignment so she supposed she didn’t have to provide the details; but, even so, she felt duty bound in reporting events in the life of the fleet to its covert backers. Miles seemed very tied to that smelly dirt-ball Barrayar these days; perhaps he had forgotten old friends, especially given the number of children he seemed to be having. Would he even see her report to ImpSec, she wondered idly? Would _Mark_?

Writing done Quinn turned to reading the latest reports from her section chiefs. Medic Durona had finally isolated the pathogen responsible for Trooper Norton’s malady: a single-stranded, negative-sense, enveloped RNA virus of the genus Morbillivirus within the family Paramyxoviridae. She shook her head at the detailed scientific explanation. (There was such a thing as too much information.) Ah, there it was: the layman’s version – measles. (Measles?) The report explained this was a newly mutated variation of an old Earth childhood ailment long since thought eradicated. Given the Dendarii’s backers and the identification of Vervain – just one short wormhole jump away from Cetaganda – as the place most likely for the sick man to have acquired the infection, Elli might have suspected some nefarious and convoluted plot to eliminate the task force that had proven so irritating to the Ghem more than once. (She had not forgotten that nerve-wracking year-long chase after Dagoola IV.) But...she looked again at the report which assured that his was an isolated case: it was Norton after all. Fortunately (or unfortunately) he was recovering nicely with no long-term ill-effects. With a deep sigh she put the med report to one side.

Quinn paused to get herself a cup of tea. Loud mews signalled urgently the need for attention; she looked down to find Tom rolling invitingly on his back. “I am honoured,” she said. “Here I’d thought myself totally deserted for your lady-love.” She reached down and picked up the hefty tom-cat, who cuddled into her neck for a moment, purring loudly, before demanding to be let down. “All right – I know, I know – you love me to stroke you; but you love food more. Don’t worry; _I_ know my true purpose.” Her words were accompanied by actions as she opened a packet, forked the contents into a bowl, and put the dish down for her pet. Quinn smiled down at her very own live fur as he tucked in hungrily, before turning back to the day’s reports. The Armoury report was thick in the extreme; that section’s Chief Officer was noted for verbosity. Quinn often thought it must be his antidote to the suddenness of death by disruptor. She put that to one side in favour of the Chief Engineer’s summary about improvements urgently needed to waste disposal systems.


End file.
